President Trump’s criminal defense lawyer just admitted that his presidential campaign illegally coordinated with the Russian government in a stunning, televised reversal.
Rudy Giuliani was a Trump campaign surrogate, who quit his law firm to be the president’s defense attorney last year. Since then, Rudy’s wacky television appearances have incriminated his client in the Stormy Daniels case and tossed the Trump campaign right under the bus.
Last night, Giuliani delivered a massive flip-flop on the topic of coordination between the Trump campaign and Putin’s regime to CNN’s Chris Cuomo: (video embedded below)
“I never said there was no collusion’ between Trump campaign and Russia,” Giuliani said.
“I said ‘the President of the United States.’ There is not a single bit of evidence the President of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here: conspiring with the Russians to hack the D.N.C.”

Donald Trump may or not be on the Russian government’s payroll.
He may or may not have been blackmailed by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
He may or may not have actively colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign.
But there’s one thing we know for sure: Donald Trump has been compromised by Russia.
Every day that he remains president will mean that he is putting Russia’s interests ahead of America’s.
The latest revelations that emerged this weekend in the Trump/Russia investigation only bolstered this notion. First, via The New York Times, we found out that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation after he fired FBI Director Jim Comey to determine if he was working on behalf of the Russian government. Then, the next day, The Washington Post revealed that Trump has gone to “extraordinary lengths” to keep the substance of his talks with Putin hidden from his own aides, “including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.”
Both stories are, of course, blockbusters — but they aren’t all that surprising.

It’s a big deal.
The arresting New York Times headline last Friday—“F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia”—sparked a strangely bifurcated reaction. A bombshell to some, a dud to others, the story has had lots of people scratching their heads: What does it even mean?
The confusion is understandable, as is the debate over the significance of this deceptively complex and nuanced report—a story that, through no fault of reporters Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos, remains incomplete in key respects.

We don’t need news reports to tell us that Trump is giving Putin what he wants. Take it from this longtime Russia hand: It’s staring us in the face.
On Friday, the New York Times revealed an FBI investigation whether Candidate Trump had colluded—the word he hates and denies—with Russians to help his campaign. The next day, the Washington Post probed into President Trump’s refusal to let his own government in on his sensitive conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among other developments, Congress has renewed calls for the State Department interpreter Maria Gross, the only other American present for Trump’s two-hour private meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, to share what she knows about the contents of their discussion.
As the plot has thickened, so have fallacious distractions. Last year the transcripts of former President Bill Clinton’s numerous meetings with the late Russian leader Boris Yeltsin were declassified, leading to persistent suggestions that Trump’s relationship with Putin is much the same as Clinton’s dealings with Yeltsin in the 1990s.

Trump's behavior toward Russia has always been a security concern, and the FBI had no choice but to open a counterintelligence operation. It did its job.
Let us sit back, just for a moment, and absorb the reality of the revelations of the past few days.
For apparently the first time in history, the president of the United States himself was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. This means that his ties to a hostile power were significant enough to overcome the high bar the FBI would have to clear to investigate any American for possibly being influenced or compromised by another country — much less its own chief executive.
We have also learned that the president has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal his discussions with an enemy foreign leader not only from intelligence and foreign policy figures in his own administration, but even from the senior officials of his own Oval Office. It should go without saying that he has tried, in this area as in so many others, to wall himself off from congressional oversight.

WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.
The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.